The following are possible bugs or unintended backwards-compatibility breaks that have been reported for Twine 1.4.0.

Windows VC++ runtime problem

The Twine windows installer has an incorrect version of the Visual C++ runtime redistributable included. As a result, users who did not already have a correct version of the runtime installed may not be able to run 1.4.

Makeshift patch

Annotation colouration

Annotation passages appear darker than intended when the “Faster but rougher story map display” preference is off.

Monospace font size

When editing a passage, the monospace font uses the normal font's font size instead of its own.

HTML tables

Putting HTML tables in passages is currently bugged - when a <tr> is created, the browser automatically wraps it in a <tbody> tag, and then puts the <tr>'s child code into the <tbody> instead of the <tr>.

Jonah scrolling in IE 8

Accessing properties of variables

If a variable has object properties accessed through dot notation (such as an array with .length or .push) then the property will be incorrectly initialised to 0, making it inaccessible.

Makeshift patch

Access the property through index notation (for instance, $array[“push”]() instead of the $array.push() notation) until the bug is fixed.

Sugarcane sidebar

The Sugarcane sidebar's CSS is missing “left:7.5em”, thus placing it too far to the left of the screen.

Makeshift patch

Put this CSS code in a stylesheet passage: #sidebar { left:7.5em; }

External link syntax highlighting

The syntax highlighting for external links is broken - all external links are displayed as bad links even if they begin with “http://”.

Variable array indexes

Due to a bug, you currently can't use variables as array indexes (such as $weapons[$hand]) unless you include extra padding whitespace.

Makeshift patch

Put a space between the array variable and the first square bracket: $weapons [$hand]

<<choice>>

«choice» ought to disable both itself and every other «choice» macro in the passage - but in 1.4.0 it only disables itself.

Shorthand <<display>>

The shorthand <<display>> syntax sometimes gives a nonsensical error if no arguments are given - for instance, <<Start>> doesn't work.

Makeshift patch

Put a space between the passage's name and the ending >>: <<Start >>

<<nobr>> errors

Due to a bug, «nobr» produces an error message if any text at all follows the closing «endnobr» tag, including whitespace. It also doesn't allow nesting «nobr» tags (but admittedly, that's not really useful at all).

Makeshift patch

Use the \ line-continuation symbol in place of «nobr» in situations where this would be an issue.

<<nobr>> and multi-line macros

If a macro tag spans multiple lines (such as one declaring an object or array literal), and is inside a «nobr», the newlines will be converted to zero-width spaces, which are not considered whitespace in Javascript, and thus cause an error.

Escaped line breaks vs. obfuscation

If you use the obfuscation option, the \ line-continuation symbol will be incorrectly changed to a backslash followed by a random letter, and the line will not continue.

<<textinput>>

This macro's absence is not actually a bug. «textinput», a macro that was added in the Twine 1.3.6 alpha, was removed from the Twine codebase by its author, as it was intended primarily for testing and was never meant for actual end-use. (In Twine 1.4.1, it may return by popular demand.)

<<back>>/<<return>> and bookmarks

Just as in 1.3.5, the «back» macro may not function correctly for game states loaded from a bookmark. If you bookmark a passage that contains a «back» macro, then reload from the bookmark, the «back» macro won't work because the loaded page is the only page in the browser history. However, the «return» macro also suffers from this deficiency, for reasons

Makeshift patch

Use [[Return|previous()]] instead of «return».

<<back>> and Undo:off

If the StorySettings option “undo” is off, then «back» may cause linkvariables in preceding passages to be forgotten or incorrect.

visited() and similar passage names

The visited() function will incorrectly consider you having visited a passage if, in the past, you visited another passage whose name is a substring of the passage. (For example, visited(“Next 2”) would incorrectly be 1 if you previously visited a passage titled “Next”.)

a:link CSS selector

In Twine 1.4, the “href” attribute was removed from internal links, because it has no purpose (except to unwittingly clue the especially canny player into the fact that the link is specifically an internal link, by the fact that hrefs are revealed by hovering over links - which may “tip the hand” of certain authors who, for instance, may try to disguise a macro link as an internal link). However, this inadvertently means that the “a:link” CSS selector promoted by Ashton Raze no longer selects internal links (since “a:link” is a synonym for “a[href]”).

Makeshift patch

Use a more precise selector for passage links, such as “.passage a”, as described here. This selector has the advantage of not selecting links outside of the passage (for instance, in the Sugarcane sidebar).

Scripts

Some old scripts, such as Leon Arnott's Tag CSS, contain a shim to get them to work with the Start passage in Twine 1.3.5, by using the state.history object. Unfortunately, the script (and presumably others like it) does not correctly check for the existence of state.history[0].passage, so it will crash in Twine 1.4. (If you are getting the error message state.history[0].passage is null or something similar, this is likely the reason.) Due to the popularity of this and other scripts, a counter-shim may be installed in Twine 1.4.1 to counteract this.

Strictly speaking, none of the 'monkey patch' Twine 1.3.5 scripts (which can be taken to mean “those that don't add new macros”) are officially supported by Twine 1.4 - since they directly replace key engine functions like History.prototype.display, they will likely eliminate new 1.4 engine features and replace them with inferior 1.3.5 features.

Recommendation

If you're using any of these scripts (which includes Tag CSS), you should delete them from your projects, as their functionality is present in Twine 1.4 out-of-the-box.